A family drama set in Shanghai, where a fractured American family faces its complicated past Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: Their twenty-two-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit-and-run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. The accident unearths a deeper fissure in the family: the shocking event that ended the Litvaks’ marriage and turned Lindsey against them. Estranged from her parents, she has confided only in her younger sister, Grace, adopted as an infant from China. As Claire and Aaron struggle to get their bearings in bustling, cosmopolitan Shanghai, the newly prosperous “miracle city,” they face troubling questions about Lindsey’s life there, in which nothing is as it seems.
Author
Jennifer Haigh is an American novelist and short story writer. Her new novel MERCY STREET takes on the contentious issue of abortion rights, following the daily life of Claudia Birch, a counselor at an embattled women's clinic in Boston. Her last novel, HEAT AND LIGHT, looks at a Pennsylvania town divided by the controversy over fracking, and was named a Best Book of 2016 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and NPR. Earlier books include the novel FAITH, about a beloved Boston priest accused of a molesting a child in his parish, and THE CONDITION, the story of a woman diagnosed in childhood with Turner's Syndrome. Haigh's critically acclaimed debut novel MRS. KIMBLE won the PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction. Her second novel, the New York Times bestseller BAKER TOWERS, won the PEN/L. L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author. Her short story collection NEWS FROM HEAVEN won of the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction. A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she writes frequently for The New York Times Book Review. Her fiction has been published in eighteen languages.
